If you’ve ever opened your Bible up a random and stuck your finger on the page hoping to find the answer to a pressing question then you are well acquainted with the practice of Bibliomancy. Fundies are often not content to merely apply the principles as laid out in the Scriptures but often read the Bible looking for some special application of a verse to their specific situation. The more obscure corners of the Old Testament is a particularly rich feeding ground for this sort of divination.
The applications derived from Bibliomancy can range from amusing to downright scary. Verses ripped from their context can be seen as Divine endorsement for everything from switching jobs to whom to marry, or what to have for dinner. In that last case, one can only hope that the verse consulted was not Ezekiel 4:12.
Perhaps not only verses but even the chapter divisions may be consulted for direction as in the case of the old joke about a man who found himself in financial trouble and opened his Bible at random to find the words “Chapter 11” emblazoned before him. As a last resort, maybe even the full color maps displaying the Journeys of Paul can be pressed into prophetic service.
Every word may be perfectly preserved in the King James Bible but evidently what those words mean depends greatly on what a person needs them to say at the moment.
Sometimes, the internet actually changes the way we think about things or the way we see the world. Other times, it merely allows us to keep doing the same things we’ve always done on much larger scale.
With that in mind, Stuff Fundies Like will from time to time feature a fundamentalist website that demonstrates what happens when fundamentalism grows larger-than-life online.
Inevitably, the first site to receive this distinction is Way of Life, home of David Cloud, O Timothy Magazine, and the Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Reading this site is like watching the proverbial train wreck — or it would be if the trains were screaming at each other at the top of their lungs about neo-Evangelicals and mixed bathing.
If you’re looking for long treatises on everything from the link between “Campus Crusaders and Rome” to “Warnings about Calvinist Home-Schooling Materials” then this is definitely the place. No matter what it is that you like to eat, watch, read, play with or listen to you can likely find a reason to separate from it on this website.
If you put six fundamentalist Baptists and six fundamentalist Mormons side by side, you might be hard pressed to determine which were which. Likewise, if you looked at the movies that each owned you’d also find much the same collection.
Although Feature Films for Families is not officially a Mormon company, they produce low-budget quasi-Christian movie fare that is very popular with fundamentalists of both Baptist and Mormon stripes. From the squeaky-clean shenanigans of the Butter Cream Gang to the deformed tenor’s dulcet tones in Rigoletto, these films have long been a staple of fundamentalist film collections.
Perhaps as some have suggested fundamentalists of different religions really do resemble each other more than they resemble the more moderate members of their own groups. At least they would seem to share a taste for the same type of saccharine cinema.
If you’ve ever heard the Fleach – Kincaid Grade Level test used to “prove” that English from the 1600’s is easier to understand that English from today, then you might be a fundamentalist. Claiming that the King James Version is written on a 7th grade level is a common defense of that particular version of Scripture. Of course, fundies don’t exactly explain how many 7th graders know the meaning of the word “wot” or could tell you what a “scrip” is used for. It’s doubtful that even a majority of adults know that the word “let” can actually mean “to prevent.” Think ye, amongst the congregations of these stripling youths that such words would be taken as acceptable for the nonce?
Perhaps fundamentalists believe that when a person is truly saved the Holy Spirit gives them an immediate education in 1611 vocabulary. As a test, can you, without looking it up, tell me what the word “carriage” means in the following sentence? “And David left his carriage in the hand of the keeper of the carriage,and ran into the army, and came and saluted his brethren.” If the Holy Spirit did not reveal to you the correct answer, then you may very well be in need of repentance.
It seems strange that a version which started out as a way to put the Bible into the hands of common people now has the opposite effect. The resistance to a new translation done from the Majority Text with ‘literal’ translation techniques shows that the version has become more than a translation of the originals. It has, in short, become a way to separate “we” from “thee.”
A silly blog dedicated to Independent Fundamental Baptists, their standards, their beliefs, and their craziness.
If you’ve ever opened your Bible up a random and stuck your finger on the page hoping to find the answer to a pressing question then you are well acquainted with the practice of Bibliomancy. Fundies are often not content to merely apply the principles as laid out in the Scriptures but often read the Bible looking for some special application of a verse to their specific situation. The more obscure corners of the Old Testament is a particularly rich feeding ground for this sort of divination.
Sometimes, the internet actually changes the way we think about things or the way we see the world. Other times, it merely allows us to keep doing the same things we’ve always done on much larger scale. 
If you put six fundamentalist Baptists and six fundamentalist Mormons side by side, you might be hard pressed to determine which were which. Likewise, if you looked at the movies that each owned you’d also find much the same collection.
